Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [31]
Her father is crazy drunk, and her mother has finally stopped crying. They sit together, cast their three long shadows, and her father talks about the angels.
Her mother is crocheting, trying not to hear the things he’s saying over and over again. A sweater out of green yarn from Woolworth’s, and the yarn makes Lila think about the cats, Mr. Mouser and Sister and Little John, all locked outside at the end of the world. She set their supper on the back steps, asked her mother if cats went to Heaven, and her mother too quickly told her yes, they go to Cat Heaven. But at least it’s cool in the cellar, like air conditioning.
The shotgun across his lap and the big family Bible open to the last few pages. They sit inside a circle of salt, and she watches her mother’s lips, counting stitches with her. Her father reads out loud all the scary parts she’s never heard.
When her mother says it’s bedtime (How can she tell? There are no clocks down here, and she’s missed television and hasn’t even had her bath), she lies down on one of the army cots. They smell like mildew and dust, the blanket smells like mothballs, and she sneezes. She wipes her nose on the back of her hand, but her mother doesn’t even yell.
“Like a thief in the night,” her father says, and after she rolls over, he says it again. Her parents throw monster-movie shadows on the walls. She’s never been this afraid, not even in tornado weather, but she doesn’t cry.
Lila stays awake as long as she can, fights the heaviness dragging at her eyelids. Watches her father when he gets up and paces the red-dirt floor, never once stepping outside his circle. She counts sheep to stay awake.
And when she loses count, she dreams about blood in the streets and fire and the sky as black as coal.
3.
At the end of the long hall, past the toilet and her mother’s old sewing room, a linen closet and the back way into the room that had been her parents’, Spyder’s bedroom was a shrine of glass and wax. A hundred jars easy, fish tanks cracked or too leaky to hold water, and everywhere candles, the only light she permitted here. All the windows were nailed shut and painted blind, two thick coats of Sears’ flat black masking each pane. She’d used a fine-tipped camel’s hair brush to trace the webs, not cartoon spiderwebs or the stylized patterns tattooed on her skin, but painstaking reproductions copied from textbooks and photographs.
At first, after Florida and the nuthouse, she’d tried sleeping in her mother’s bedroom. It was so much bigger, and it’d seemed a shame to waste, but she could always smell the deathbed stench and her dreams had been even worse than usual. So she had crammed most of her stuff into this narrow space at the very back of the house, the room that had been hers as a child. Had patched the drafty walls with spackling paste and wood putty and used a staple gun to repair the peeling strips of wallpaper. Had tacked up the extra insulation of poster prints by Edvard Munch and H. R. Giger, Dali and Gustav Klimt.
Spyder lit a cinnamon-scented candle, closed and locked the door behind her. The crickets were making a fuss, and she shook the carton, stared through the wire-mesh window set into the side (“Live Bait, Catch the Big’uns!”). Tiny bodies scrambling over each other, clinging to the sides, fidgeting antennae and hair-trigger legs.
“What do you little fucks know, huh?” And Spyder thumped the side of the carton, knocking some of the crickets over on their shiny brown backs. “You don’t know shit, do you?”
She was starting to feel better by scant degrees, the whisper and shimmer at the borders beginning to ebb and fade. She’d double her Klonopin tonight, just to be safe, just to be sure things stayed that way until morning. But her room was almost as good as the meds, so absolutely her, nothing left to guard against. She could breathe here